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3: Silver Dollar: Tom, 1964
- Oregon State University Press
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42 3 Silver Dollar Tom, 1964 One day in late May, barely two months after the tsunami, Tom Horning came home from school to find his grandparents and mother sitting on a drift log in the yard under a tall spruce, watching the bay. Grandma and Grandpa Baker lived in Berkeley, California. They hadn’t been up to visit since the previous summer, when Grandpa had taken the Hornings’ little seaside cottage and transformed it into the kids’ playhouse and Chris’s and Tom’s bedroom. Tom spotted him from the driveway as he rode up on his bike. His mother was usually working at that time of day; she must have left work to meet them. He ditched the bike in the garage, then eased around the corner, watching, overcome by a sudden shyness. It had been a year, after all. At the sound of Tom’s feet on the gravel driveway, Grandpa, in his crisp white shirt and bolo tie, looked up, turning his head toward Tom, waving him over with a big smile, huge creases forming at the sides of the old man’s tanned face. Tom approached slowly, and when he got there, Grandpa, ever formal, ever affectionate, reached out a hand and ruffled the hair on the top of Tom’s head. At that touch, Tom knew all was right with the world. Grandfather Baker was a tall man, taller even than his nearly six-foottall daughter, his white hair neatly trimmed, and his skin ruddy from the California sun. Grandmother Baker wasn’t as tall, nor quite as tender, and Tom had developed a certain caution around her. Often Tom would see just his mother and grandfather sitting on that log side-by-side with their matching square jaws, she with her signature sweatshirt and cheap tennis shoes and straight back, he starched and just beginning to stoop. In him, you could see where Bobbie came from, just as, looking at Bobbie, you could see the man Tom would become: tall and big-boned, a little quirky, a square peg. Grandfather didn’t busy himself with a lot of chores this visit, as he had during his visit the previous summer. He and Grandma Baker were on vacation, heading north to catch the ferry up the Inland Passage to Alaska and Canada. Most days he seemed content to just sit with Bobbie, to watch the gulls circling over the estuary, the osprey diving for fish, the flocks silver dollar 43 of sanderlings that wheeled and spun like a gust of mirrors. Sometimes Tom would take walks with his grandfather, the older man always teaching, pointing out a little spruce seedling taking root on a drift stump at the edge of the bay, cocking his head to hear the call of a songbird hidden in the branches of a shore pine. Born in 1890, Fredrick Storrs Baker was a forester, dean emeritus of the University of California School of Forestry, author of a leading silviculture textbook, a professor popular with students for his enthusiasm and utter lack of pretense. It was he who had taught Bobbie how to skip rocks across the surface of a creek. His parents had been amateur botanists, so forestry had been a natural career choice, just as a career in entomology had seemed natural to his daughter Bobbie, a tall tomboy with an aptitude for science. She could name all the trees and wildflowers but she loved even more to watch a spider weave a web outside a window, to follow a beetle scuttling through the duff on the forest floor. Ultimately she got bogged down trying to memorize the minutiae of insect morphology: the plumose and serrate and pectinate antennae, the hundreds of different vein patterns in the forewings and hindwings. Bobbie had always been more interested in books and bugs than in boys; as a young woman, she was taller than most men, favored practicality over fashion, was quick with a laugh but never coy. Her own mother had suggested, and she’d agreed, that with her looks and manner, marriage was probably not in her future. Nursing would require less schooling than entomology and would guarantee self-sufficiency. So Bobbie went to nursing school, then promptly—to her mother’s surprise, and perhaps to her own—had married John Horning, the son of one of her father’s friends and forestry colleagues, and moved north to Oregon. Two Christmases before, Grandpa Baker had given Tom a silver...